Maggie Gyllenhaal’s about to have a new movie in theaters, as her deliberately provocative creature feature The Bride!exclamation points its way into cineplexes on March 6. That means Gyllenhaal is currently on the promotional rounds, including a pretty in-depth and interesting interview she gave to The New York Times this week in which she acknowledged, yes: She had some “envy” to process toward her brother Jake, whose career took off much faster than hers did when they both began acting as teenagers.
“When I was young and Jake was a movie star right away,” Gyllenhaal notes at one point in the interview, “I don’t think I was in touch with the envy, but it was there.” Although she denies that the pair were ever “estranged,” Gyllenhaal also says “We’ve never been as close as we are now. We’re finally, maybe in the last five years, more and more and more, even each day, really interacting, which is hard for people to do.” (That includes professionally; Jake co-stars in The Bride!, along with Jessie Buckley, Christian Bale, and Gyllenhaal’s husband, Peter Sarsgaard.)
Gyllenhaal also describes the intensity of inviting her brother to be in the film, saying, “I waited until I was absolutely sure that asking him to do this part was the right thing to do. I remember asking him and tearing up alone in this hotel room I was in, because it meant so much to me. It meant so much for me to interact with him… In the past, I’ve had to be separate from my family, from my brother. Like, cool, I’ve got my own thing going. We both started so young.”
Beyond familial stuff—including the bizarre tensions of directing her husband having sex scenes with Buckley in her directorial debut The Lost Daughter—Gyllenhaal also has a lot to say about making movies in general. That includes a perfect willingness to debate the sexual politics of her 2002 breakout Secretary (“The thing about Secretary, at least as I intended it, was that it was consensual. She wanted that erotic relationship with her boss. And so who is anyone to tell her that that is not allowed?”), some studio notes she got on The Bride (“Maggie, you cannot have Frankenstein lick black vomit off the Bride’s neck. It’s just too much. You can’t do it.”), and the dearth of big-budget female-directed projects in Hollywood. (“It’s fine when we make little movies. ‘Cute,’ you know, ‘Go make your little movie.’ It starts to get dangerous when women have their hands on a lot of money.”)
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